Monday's game proved something to all of us, from State College to Tuscaloosa: America can retain its identity, even with a second football.

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I watched at an Irish-themed sports bar in a football-obsessed (the other one, with the hitting) college town, my buddy Dave and our young kids, six of us crammed into a high-top table as a standing-room crowd filled in around us. If you asked my children what they most remember about Monday, my 6-year-old daughter would probably say it was the noise, and my 9-year-old son would no doubt smile and say it was all the f-bombs dropped by the guy at the table behind us.

What I remember, and what I'm sure will stay with me, is the joy of jumping up and down and spilling my beer and hugging strangers and chanting "USA!" un-ironically for the first time since I was six years old, when the "Miracle on Ice" played out on my living room television and my father wrapped me in a joyous hug.

Sports bars in places like this—State College or Tuscaloosa, College Station or Baton Rouge—aren't supposed to fill up for soccer games, nor for much of anything in the sleepy summer months, and yet here we were, packed into a noisy, fuck-yeah-laden place with lots of beer and lots of red-white-and-blue-clad new friends. Nobody had to ask the bartenders to turn off a baseball game, because every one of the 30 TVs in the place was tuned to the game. I know at least three other spots in town were similarly packed—and while I don't know how many of these people cared about soccer a week or six months or four years or ten minutes ago, I know it's all they cared in those 90-plus minutes.

Yes, I'm an American Soccer Fan, though not one of the bandana-wearing obsessives who name their dogs "Deuce." I know some of these people, and they're fine people indeed, but it doesn't matter to me quite that much. I do love the game, though, the athleticism and skill and absurdity and culture and how, more than any other sport I can think of, it embodies all the beauty and unfairness and absurdity of real life.

Soccer at the international level is a corrupt mess full of cheats that raises your hopes only to dash them cruelly or comically or sometimes both, and it only rarely offers these brief moments of ecstasy that you can only appreciate if you're really paying attention, and if that's not real life on most of the planet, then you know something I don't.

And because real life is usually enjoyed and endured with other humans, I love the World Cup, and I especially love that in mid-June in a half-empty college town, I can experience what I did Monday. Because that game confirmed what I think a lot of us knew, or sensed, but sometimes still struggle to realize: We don't have to fight for soccer anymore. We don't need to defend it, and we sure as hell don't need to argue for its due respect. The respect is evident in ESPN's wall-to-wall coverage, flawed as it may sometimes be. It's clear when the bar owners understand that, yes, this is every bit as big as the Super Bowl or NCAA tournament, and they tune their TVs accordingly.

There are still lots of Americans who hate soccer, of course, and that's fine. Most of these people are idiots. It's fine if you're ambivalent about soccer. I'm ambivalent about hockey, for instance, and also about things like sushi and "color runs," but I get why people are into them. People who actively hate soccer usually do so because of awful ideological or xenophobic reasons, so calling them idiots is probably the nicest thing I can say. But we are now, officially, free to never worry about them again.

(And a word about ideology: Of the many, many fan reaction videos flying around the Web today, this compilation is the best I've seen, not least because of the places where people are watching the game: Lots of red-meat, red-leaning college football towns, not to mention noted liberal enclaves like Omaha, Dallas, and… an Army base in Afghanistan. This screen grab from College Station, TX, home of Texas A&M and the George Bush Presidential Library, says so much. Yes, young Republicans love soccer, too.)

There are probably still prominent sports media idiots who hate soccer, though admittedly I can't be sure because I've been ignoring them for years. But it's clear the SportsCenter hosts have gotten the message; just a few years removed from mocking mispronunciations of foreign names and locales, they treat World Cup or European league coverage as seriously as they do any update on the NFC playoff race. Certainly there are still scattered pseudo-public-intellectual idiots who hate soccer, but that's also fine, because nobody pays attention to public intellectuals anymore.

The hate is still there, and it will be, and it no longer matters, because it no longer affects our ability to enjoy the game.

American soccer fans have won.We believed that we would win. And as the most optimistic of us might have told you, even after Ghana's late equalizer on Monday, it was always, still, just a matter of time.